The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

THE BOOK OF TELLS point

THE BOOK OF TELLS point out that while a subordinate person needs to smile to appease a dominant person, the dominant person is 'licensed' to smile when he or she likes. 12 The clue to why the dominant person smiles more in a friendly situation becomes clear when we look at the different ways that people compose their facial features into a smile. We all know that some smiles are genuine and others are false. That's because we see people pretending to be happy, and we know what it feels like to smile when we're feeling miserable. Although we're constantly exposed to fake smiles, and spend a great deal of our time producing them for the benefit of other people, it's only since facial expressions have been studied in detail that we have come to understand what distinguishes a genuine smile from a false smile. One of the first scientists to tackle this issue was the French anatomist, Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who published his Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine in 1862, ten years before Darwin's book on the face appeared. Duchenne was fascinated by the musculature of the face - an interest he reputedly developed while examining heads chopped off by the guillotine. He was also the first person to apply electrical currents to the face to see how the muscles worked. 13 Duchenne discovered that genuine smiles involve two sets of muscles. The first is the zygomatic major muscles, which run down the side of the face and attach to the corners of the mouth. When these are contracted the corners of the mouth are pulled up, the cheeks are puffed up, and the teeth are sometimes exposed. The second set of muscles, the orbicularis oculi, surround the eyes. When these are contracted the eyes become narrow and 'crow's 90

SUBMISSIVE TELLS feet' appear beside the eyes. Duchenne recognized that the critical clue to a genuine smile was to be found in the region of the eyes, because while the zygomatic major muscles are under conscious control, the orbicularis oculi are not. As he put it, The emotion of frank joy is expressed on the face by the combined contraction of the zygomaticus major muscle and the orbicularis oculi. The first obeys the will but the second is only put in play by the sweet emotions of the soul. . . The muscle around the eye does not obey the will; it is only brought into play by a true feeling, by an agreeable emotion. Its inertia, in smiling, unmasks a false friend. If you watch how subordinate people behave towards dominant people, you'll notice that most of their smiles involve the muscles above the mouth instead of those around the eyes - in other words, they're 'mouth smiles' rather than 'mouth&eye smiles', or what are known as 'Duchenne smiles'. Strictly speaking, mouth smiles are 'false' smiles because they pretend to show enjoyment but they're really only motivated by the desire to appear sociable and unthreatening. But if you watch how dominant people behave towards their subordinates, you'll notice that they smile far less, but that their smiles are more likely to be 'mouth&eye smiles'. This difference arises because subordinates use smiling for the purpose of appeasement, whereas dominant people have the licence to smile when and how they wish. Smiles that are designed to appease may differ from genuine smiles in other ways. They may, for example, involve the corners of the mouth being pulled sideways rather than up, so that 91